María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold | Through June 9 | The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham
In 2014, the artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons led a procession through the Guggenheim Museum while wearing a tiered dress shaped like the Guggenheim Museum. It was both celebration and protest: Campos-Pons had been invited by her friend, the photographer Carrie Mae Weems, to stage a performance for Weems’ retrospective exhibition—the first for a Black artist in the museum’s 55-year history.
A video of the performance, “Habla La Madre,” plays on a continuous loop in the final room of Behold, on view at the Nasher Museum. A themed, career-spanning survey of Campos-Pons’s work, the exhibition is between stops at the Brooklyn Museum, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (where Campos-Pons works as a professor at Vanderbilt University), and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
In the video, Campos-Pons invokes Santería orishas (deities), smashes plates on the floor, and releases goldfish into the Guggenheim’s fountain, all while encircled by rings of white fabric that echo the form of the famed Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building. For the first time in the institution’s history, she told the INDY, she had made the Black body into the “spinning center of the Guggenheim.”
The performance was a powerful expression of rage at the historical exclusion of Black people from venerable art institutions, but it was also an homage to a beautiful building and an artist whom Campos-Pons loves. She sees Frank Lloyd Wright and herself as part of the same lineage, descended from Yemayá, the orisha of water.
“He, too, is a son of Yemayá,” she says, “even though he didn’t know it.”
Although Behold, curated by Carmen Hermo and Mazie Harris with Jenée-Daria Strand, consists mostly of photographs and works on paper, “Habla La Madre” embodies the idiosyncratic vision that defines Campos-Pons’ multimedia oeuvre.
“I started doing performance art,” she said, “when I couldn’t express what I was feeling and thinking through painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, film or video—any of those—and I wanted to become a body: a thing that feels, that milks, that spits, that cries.”
The body is a locus of connection for Campos-Pons. Hers is a world in which every being—Frank Lloyd Wright, Santería orishas, and everything in between—is linked by tendrils of history, family, land, and spirit. In “Umbilical Cord” (1991), one of the earliest pieces on display in Behold, photographs of Campos-Pons and five of her female relatives are threaded by a wire wrapped with fabric and Cuban soil. Above the photographs is a portrait of Campos-Pons’s grandmother, their common ancestor.
Campos-Pons was born in 1959 and grew up in Matanzas, Cuba, on the same sugar plantation where her great-grandfather Gabriel had been enslaved; she has Cantonese ancestors who were brought to Cuba as indentured laborers in the nineteenth century.
A child of diaspora who has since lived and worked on multiple continents, she is interested in how to locate identity in dislocation—how to explain, for example, the fact that a religious tradition like Santería could emerge from the violence and dispossession of the transatlantic slave trade.
Campos-Pons is best known for her photographic assemblages, which are usually self-portraits and are always shot using a large-format Polaroid camera.
In “Finding Balance” (2015), she looks magisterial in an antique Chinese theatrical costume; her face is white with cascarilla, an eggshell powder used in Santería. Arrestingly beautiful and technically accomplished, the 8 x 13-foot composition (28 separate photographs) occupies an entire wall in the exhibition and has an otherworldly presence.
Many of the compositions on display at the Nasher are triptychs, including the haunting “Identity Could Be a Tragedy” (1996), a trio of self-portraits. Campos-Pons engages with identity not as a set of hyphenate categories but as a collection of vital linkages—umbilical cords, perhaps—that reach across time and space. Through color, composition, and performance she presents intersectionality as it was originally formulated by the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective: shared identity as a source of communal power.
“Identity confuses us in what we are and makes us think of ourselves in a kind of conflicting space with others—that is tragic,” Campos-Pons says. “One of the things that marks identity is the capacity to relate.”
In her photographic assemblages, frames become spaces of visual connection and disconnection: they link as they divide, like the sea between continents. Several of the compositions on view evoke the ocean with vivid blues and rich symbolism—most notably in “De Las Dos Aguas (Of the Two Waters),” with its twists of hair connecting each element in the scene—but the ocean otherwise appears in several somewhat disappointing watercolor and gouache works, which don’t have the force or formal inventiveness of the photographs.
One of the most moving works on display, however, is not a photograph. “Spoken Softly With Mama” is a sculptural séance: images and videos of Campos Pons’ ancestors are projected onto seven ironing boards that stand upright in a dark room. Ghostly cast-glass irons are arranged in a kind of mandala between them.
Nearby, “TRA” (1991) summons the horrors of the Middle Passage with carved wooden sculptures that depict bodies packed into slave ships. In stark emotional contrast, the installation also includes photographs of smiling Afro-Cubans, descendants of those who survived the crossing. Campos-Pons makes history material, reminding us in a vivid Santería color palette that we all exist somewhere in a vast web of connection.
An exhibition like Behold should be “a place for mediation,” Campos-Pons says, between past and present, self and other. “I carry a lot of pain and anguish and lacerations from history—the past that I get to know and acknowledge—but also incredible amounts of joy and hope and trust that it’s so difficult, but the best days are ahead and should be built together.”
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